Many artists, especially young ones, wish for relevancy. Noah Steinman is almost overwhelmed by it.

Just 26, the artist lives in Norwalk and has a day job at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield. Steinman finds himself engaged in a years-long project of wringing art from books that promote alien virtues of racial and sexual purity. He works from a collection, scrounged from flea markets and online sellers, that includes several titles put out by the now-defunct Eugenics Publishing Co. of New York. The company cast itself as progressive, but its 1937 catalog (available on Amazon) was titled “Books for the Good of the Race.” One volume, “Female Sex Perversion: The Sexually Aberrated Woman as She Is,” presents itself as a sympathetic discussion of how women become and can overcome homosexuality.

Steinman leafs through its pages to show what it is and what he has done to it. On some pages he has covered the text with paintings or collages of his own making. On others he has used a wood-burning tool as a red pencil, not just striking out words, but leaving singed holes in the page. Such editing by itself can be a form of “erasure poetry,” but Steinman also sees himself as a censor whose goal is to reveal rather than suppress.

“I want to expose how terrible it is,” he says. “The kind of censorship I’m doing is less about concealing their intent than censoring their pleasantries and packaging so the intent is shown at face value.”

He reads aloud from what remains of a passage on page 84 about a young woman named Bernice. “One day as she sat in her home writing, she began to tremble, screamed and flung the fountain pen through the window. The doctor who was hurriedly summoned to treat her found his patient in hysterical convulsions.”

On the facing page 85, Steinman has left intact a reference to Freud, who suggests Bernice’s writing may have been a sublimated attempt at a curative orgasm, and the reassurance that, “She is now on the way to recovery.”

Published in 1935, with a foreword by a Johns Hopkins University doctor, “Female Sex Perversion” is not overtly racist, but the science of eugenics involved the study of those deemed deviant and genetically unfit, and was so widely accepted it led to sterilization laws. It originated in England with Francis Galton, who was influenced by the evolutionary theory of his half cousin, Charles Darwin, and was pursued at top universities in the United States. It was finally discredited by Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies.

Steinman embodies two of the populations targeted by Nazis. In his artist’s statement for the Westport Artists Collective, he introduces himself as a “Queer, Jewish person” in the “process of reclaiming and transforming” often “barbaric and alarmingly recent texts.”

He is as thoughtful as his statement reads, but during a lunch-hour interview at the Aldrich, where he works in the education department, he also came across as buoyant and energetic as his age would suggest. “It’s an insane time to be doing this kind of work,” he says, referring to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and the almost daily reports of battles over Civil War statues and transgender bathroom laws.

“My question is how to respond so you’re still making progress and not making one work that half addresses an important issue. Because they’re all over the place, whether it’s homophobia or violence against women or violence against people based on their race or their religion. All of these things are rapid fire and happening in a very public way.”

Steinman was preparing for a group pop-up show at the Westport Arts Center and a longer exhibition as a 2016 Faculty Student Award winner at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he earned his MFA. He found the first book in his collection, “Faith and Behavior: Christian Answers to Moral Problems,” at an Ohio flea market about the time he began studying art at Oberlin College. It reminded wives of the duties, sexual and otherwise, they owed their husbands. “It was packaged as this beautiful self-help book,” he says. But in his eyes it was an abhorrent fiction. “As soon as I saw this book, the idea of protest revealed itself. I thought that’s a perfect kind of work to do.”

He labored over the book for five years, honing his painting and drawing skills to assure his use of photography and collage would be seen as a deliberate choice rather than a default. His portfolio also includes sculpture, but his altered- book strategy was set. “I liked the act of taking them out of circulation so they couldn’t be used for their intended purpose. I was interested in taking books that I didn’t respect or appreciate and creating something beautiful, or at least interesting, out of these dark, offensive texts,” he says.

For gallery exhibits, Steinman may display the books. He also reproduces selected pages in blown-up photographs. So far he’s done five book projects, with others in progress.

Among the advice books are recent editions of a guide for parents worried about a child’s sexuality published in 2002 and re-issued in 2012. They advocate conversion therapy for homosexuality. In May, Connecticut became the eighth state to ban the therapy. But a century ago, Connecticut was one of the first states to pass a sterilization law, aimed at “imbeciles” and others deemed unfit to reproduce.

Steinman says newer books have a shock value, reminding people of the persistence of the ideas underpinning them. He emphasizes he belongs to a growing community of LGBT artists engaged in some form of resistance. He says it feels “validating to see the conversation I’ve been having with myself for almost the last 10 years” merging with a broader conversation.

“There’s an audience for my work, whereas before it almost felt like preaching to the choir. But from my perspective these issues haven’t been resolved at all. All of sudden the relevance was brought back into the forefront,” he says.

“So people don’t look at my work and say, ‘Oh, people don’t think like that any more.’ They say, ‘Oh, did you hear about Charlottesville? Did you hear what happened’? The relevance is much more visible.”